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Saturday, 2 September 2017

LG V30 Photos Reporting an f/1.7 Aperture instead of f/1.6

The LG V30 was announced earlier this week in Berlin at the IFA trade show. It’s LG’s latest flagship smartphone and the feature that it is really pushing with this new smartphone is its camera. The camera has always been a big deal for the LG V series since it debuted in 2015. But with the V30, it’s the first smartphone to have a f/1.6 aperture. What this means is that the sensor opens wider, and allows more light to come in, than with other sensors. Most others are around f/1.7 to f/2.0 – the lower the number, the wider the aperture. However, it appears that LG’s V30 is not reporting the aperture correctly in the gallery or Google Photos app.

Now before we dive to deep into this, it’s important to mention that the units that are floating in the wild right now are pre-production units that are not final hardware nor final software. So in all honesty, this is likely a software bug that will get fixed before the device is made available later this fall. But currently, when you take a photo using the main camera which has the f/1.6 aperture, it will then show in the LG Gallery app or Google Photos that it is f/1.7. And if you take a look at Google Photos on desktop, it’ll show that the aperture is actually f/1.69. So it’s possible that things just haven’t actually updated yet, and that’s usually an issue when smartphones come out with brand new features that have never been seen before.

This is not a big deal for most people. The reporting of the aperture size is not going to change the way the photo looks. And all of the photos taken with the LG V30 look amazing so far – and that’s with this not even being final software. While it may bug some people, it’s not that much of an issue. But for now, we’ll chop this up as not being final software, as LG did mention that the camera app will likely force close quite a bit during our experience with this pre-production unit, as usually the case with pre-production units anyways.